HUMAN AMYGDALA-LIMBIC LESIONS AND EMOTIONAL BEHAVIOR

Miriam Hospital, Providence RI

Investigators

Abstract

Disorders of emotion are a leading cause of human suffering and disability, yet emotion is one of the least studied biological phenomena. Decades of animal studies have demonstrated that damage to amygdala systems is responsible for changes in emotional behavior, but these studies have not fully accounted for the complexity and richness of human emotional experience. This study will examine how acquired lesions of the amygdala and associated limbic areas caused by either herpes simplex encephalitis (HSE) or temporal lobectomy (TLE) affect emotional behavior. The specific aims of this project are to determine the impact of amygdala lesions on: 1) emotional response systems (i.e., self-report, behavior, and psychophysiology), 2) appetitive and aversive motivational systems (i.e., emotional valence) and 3) memory for standard emotionally evocative photographs. This project will be among the first to examine these areas in amygdala lesioned patients using a standard paradigm and normative emotionally-laden stimuli. My vision is to utilize an NRSA Fellowship to collect data that will provide information relevant to better understanding the underlying mechanisms of emotion and memory. I plan to use the data collected from this study to submit a future NIH R01 grant that will focus on further delineation of the neural systems involved in emotional processing and memory. Identification of the crucial, interacting neural systems in emotional behavior will lead to better interventions for debilitating psychological conditions.